Invitation
by WinterVines
Summary: Calling Yuffie may not have been a good idea. Slight Yuffentine.


I am so late to the party that the dust bunnies are looking at me strangely. Replaying FF7 again, though, so I'm dabbling and experimenting. This idea has probably been done, but it wouldn't leave me alone.

Per usual, I don't own the rights to this fandom. I just like to entertain myself with it.

* * *

Invitation

* * *

Vincent turns on a heel and fires.

The shot from the hip is too late to save him from sharp talons clawing past his coverings and into his skin, but he makes sure the next two count. He takes care of it quickly, but the damage is already done. With a small screech of breath, the Bagrisk crashes to the dirt dead, but he can feel the green insect's added effect start seeping into his blood.

With a heavy breath, Vincent pulls his read cloak straight and moves on, following the rest of the river until he clears the first row of trees. A trio of Crown Lance had wandered too far up the river and tailed him before, trying to inflict sleep. Drowsiness from the jellyfish must've been why he hadn't caught his attacker until the last second.

There's a cool breeze ruffling the leaves that were scattered on the ground, but Vincent feels hot. A reaction to the slow petrify, more than likely.

His vision ebbs as he slows his next step, and he finds it's almost impossible to take another. He was losing feeling in his feet. Stubbornly, he pushes on, even though its as if the gold clippings on his boots are of cement instead of metal. On the next stretch of leg, he stumbles.

There was nothing in his possession that could lift his ailment. The Nibelheim mountains had drained his supplies, and he had avoided the town as he trekked over land. Cosmo Canyon had been skipped too. He had planned to make for the recovering town of Gongaga to restock, but he wasn't going to make it that far.

Now he was paying for it. He falls as his knee locks up when he puts pressure on it, collapsing to the ground with a splash of dust. He wills his body to move, but it screams back at him. His arms shake as they lift upward, and then he is flat again, accompanied by a wave of tingling that foretell the freezing of his limbs.

As he catches his breath, he feels the phone in his pocket as it's squished between the dirt and his body. He could call for help.

Vincent couldn't say it was a very appealing option. Who would he call? But his eyes spasm and the forest blurs, and that hesitation is shaky for a moment.

He would probably be fine. It wouldn't be the first time his body had triumphed over some errant status, and it had never failed him before. But that was when Chaos had flowed through his veins, back when Omega had only been a theory. Did his state now mean he was no longer immune?

Then, the beast roars inside of him—one of the remaining. He feels the claws of the Galian rake the inside of his body, spurring his arm to move on its own. Before he realizes it, his metal claw had phone in hand. The demon demanded to live.

It takes more coordination than he thought to flip open the communication device. His sight clouds when he stares at it, and every second he waits is a second closer to stone. Carefully, as to not break the phone, the digits on his claw press buttons. He hopes they're the right ones.

When he hears a steady ringtone through the speaker, there is a little touch of relief that it worked. It's picked up on the third ring, paired with a shrill, "_Yuffie!"_

The irony is not lost on him that she is the one person he gets in contact with—the one who dials him endlessly. He must've selected the last one to call him.

He prepares what he wants to say and suddenly finds that he can't. His lips feel too heavy to move, and even holding the phone up to his face is too much work. His claw drops it on the ground next to him, and he can only stare at the screen with his cheek against the dirt.

"_Helloooo?"_ Yuffie calls from the other end when he's been silent too long. There is a pause for a moment, like she pulled back to check the caller ID, and then she asks, "_Vince, that you?_"

But he can't answer. His carelessness has rendered his body disabled.

"_Hey, what's going on!?"_ he hears, right before everything goes out of focus and his vision fades to black.

* * *

He wakes as the demon fights his affliction.

His fingernails have grown to sharp, jagged points, and from the hair running over his face, he can see how some has bled to white. His body feels heavy and dead, though his muscles are spasming from the inside as the Galian Beast struggles to get out. His vision slides from clear to foggy.

Then, the echo of boots pounding against the ground. This was the real problem with petrify. Even if it wore off, some wandering monster was likely to turn the body to dust before the victim came to.

Galian roars, but it's only in his head. He tries to tense his body to defend himself, to reach Cerberus, to do anything, but it isn't working. The demon rages.

A familiar wheeze greets him as a figure in a white cloak bursts from the trees, pausing as she hunches over to catch her breath. "Found you!" she calls, giving him a grin as her hood falls back and her dark hair bobs around her face.

Yuffie tucks her Conformer behind her back as she approaches, and Vincent realizes that this may not have been a good idea after all. It isn't safe. He doesn't have control.

His demons were terrifying, even now that Chaos was absent. Those pieces of himself that were warped by Hojo's experiments. The slow petrify means he will not be able to hold them in check.

The woman seems unaware of the issue, however, as she nears and whistles low. "Nice work. You gotta take better care of yourself. Can't have extremely powerful ninjas around to save you all the time, you know?"

She's smiling as she crouches down to grab his shoulder. Vincent tries to edge away from her as his red eyes blur for a second. He must've managed a small nudge of his head because he sees her roll her eyes. An exasperated noise leaves her mouth, as if to say _really?_ She can't hear how the demon howls. He did not know if stone could hold him.

Yuffie reaches out to him and he tenses, flexing his will to stay the demon. But it proves unnecessary. When she touches his shoulder, the beast is quiet.

"It's not like I have cooties or something," she adds, when the danger is over, trying to shuffle his body around enough to carry him.

Before she gets very far, she suddenly drops him and stands up straight, her Conformer in her hand as her moogle cloak flies to the side. She looks back at him and shoots him a sheepish look. "Whoops. Just one second."

Then he sees what she must have sensed. A pair of lumbering Grand Horns come crashing through the trees, but she stands ready to defend him.

Yuffie makes a pleased noise as one of the deep red materia on her weapon glows. The wind kicks up around her as Typhoon readies to strike, and she grins. He can't help but notice that with the dirt streaks and her garb billowing around, she's retained a wild streak of her own.

Then, she howls her battle cry and jumps up and down, striking a pose with one arm akimbo and the other holding her Conformer up to the sky. "If you think you're gonna make Vinnie lunchmeat, you got another thing coming!"

* * *

When feeling returns to his limbs, they are camped in a cave in the canyons.

Night has fallen, but the cavern is kept warm from the fire Yuffie happily started with her materia. She's keeping watch at the cave mouth, posting herself as sentry as she did in the forest, just like when they all took shifts in the Jenova War. That time was so long ago now, although he's passed those three years in a daze.

The ninja hums to herself as her fingers twirl a shuriken. She's always in motion, always talking, dancing, something. She lives as she breathes, normally. But now she's mostly quiet, and it's strange but not altogether unpleasant.

Vincent rotates his wrists as movement returns to them. In an hour's time, he will probably be make to normal, but he isn't in a hurry and will gladly spend the night on the mountain just in case.

When he looks across the fire, he sees the light play over her skin. The flames make her Wutaiian features sharp, illuminating her dark hair to a mousey brown and giving her skin a glowing pigment common among her people—and his, when he remembers.

After a second she turns, feeling eyes on her with that other sense warriors never seemed to be rid of. "Do I got something on my face or what?" she jests, reaching up to wipe her cheek. They've had much worse than dirt smudged across their skin, so she isn't bothered, just playing along. It isn't until she realizes that he's not answering that she looks back to him. As she turns, hair falls over her eye.

"You alright?"

For a moment, she isn't Yuffie, but instead a woman with brown hair tied up in a ponytail with a yellow ribbon. The fire puts a glint in her eye that burns gray to amber. He is brought back to a time when things were not alright, and it was only the beginning of the end to what he would lose. When Lucrecia would back away from him, he was consumed in darkness, and there was so much guilt.

"Vinnie?"

And then she is just Yuffie again, and the guilt has been settled. Yuffie, who did not run away when his demons raged on the field of battle or when his past caught up to haunt him. Still comrades even if the war is over. She is just the ninja who is full of life as always. Some things had changed since Omega, but some things had not.

When his eyes came back into focus, she loses that tense line in her shoulder that precedes motion and settles back more comfortably against the rock. She grins at him, communication without words, and he pushes ancient memories away.

"Are you sure you're feelin' okay? I could always shoot you up with some of this," she adds, a vial of milky liquid suddenly twirling between her fingers.

He makes a barely-audible sound that could've maybe been a half snort of amusement, and she looks back out into the night. No monsters would sneak up on them while the Great Ninja Yuffie was on watch.

And although it bruised that invincible aura that had built up around him, he was glad she came. Glad he wasn't cast in stone somewhere in the forest while monsters hacked away at his unmoving body. Glad there were still people that mattered, and to be reminded that the world had not given up on him.

"Yuffie," he says suddenly, in a low sound that barely makes it across the distance. "Thanks."

There's a certain glint in her eyes as a smile tugs her lips. She doesn't get up, but instead she says, "Hey, what did I tell you about taking me so seriously?"

* * *

In the morning, when the fire has burned down to ashes and daylight drips into the cavern, she's gone.

There is no sign of a struggle, which he surely would've woken from, so he knows she left of her own accord. He is not worried. She's more than proved herself before.

As he sits up from his rock bed, he stretches his limbs, testing each part of him as he chases away stiffness not from any petrification. It's gone, as he predicted.

The cave is quiet without Yuffie's talking or the fire crackling, but there is something pleasant about the still morning. As is routine, he checks his supplies as he prepares to leave.

He is not surprised that one of the shining blue orbs of materia from his equipment, the one next to his Cure, is gone. He is slightly surprised the All materia is the only one missing.

A flashing light from the screen of his phone catches his attention. It's laying between him and the fire remnants. When he flips it open, he finds a message from Yuffie is waiting on the answering machine. As he prepares to shove the device in his pocket, he hesitates, then thinks better and hits the listen button. If he does not check it now, there will be three more calls before noon.

"_Good morning!_" she trills in that sing song voice. "_That is, if you bother to check it. Next time, call me _before _you're deliberating donating your organs to the Cosmo Canyon monsters, 'kay? Reeve had a hell of a time tracking your phone._"

He hears the pounding of feet against the ground and the whisper of wind like maybe she's flying through the branches of trees despite her motion sickness.

"_Oh! About that materia—you know it wasn't gonna help you anyway. But,"_ she adds, drawing out the vowel until her voice cuts off with a thump and a grunt, "_if you really want it back that badly, maybe you can shake your way in Costa Del Sol's direction where it'll actually work_."

The message ends with a sharp curse and another thunk, and he replaces his phone in his pocket as Yuffie's invitation echoes in the quiet cave. He gathers his equipment, checks the rest of his materia again—because it's Yuffie, and better to be safe than sorry—and starts the descent down the rock face toward Gongaga and the other half of the continent.

He had been heading in that direction anyway.


End file.
